Bob Anderson: Boot Up Your Inner Game

Bob Anderson has dedicated his career to exploring the intersections between leadership and personal mastery, and between competence and consciousness. Over the past 35 years, he has helped leaders gain deep, personal insight into their creative competencies that promote effective leadership, and their reactive tendencies that limit it. He is the creator of The Leadership Circle Profile, a 360 leadership assessment tool that provides integrated feedback in multiple domains across the Creative and Reactive categories.

In our conversation, we focus on recent findings based on qualitative data provided by senior leaders in large, complex organizations.

"A Creative style of leadership is driven by passion, purpose and vision and is about bringing into being what I care about and becoming who I most desire to be as a leader.  Reactive leadership is about responding to problems, fears and threats.

You can't create the kind of agile, adaptive innovative and engaged workplaces that we are trying to construct in order to thrive in a VUCA world.  You literally can't create those cultures and systems and structures from a Reactive leadership mindset."

- Bob Anderson

Bob Anderson is the creator of the Leadership Circle Profile, a groundbreaking 360 leadership assessment. We recorded this call on February 21st, 2020. The date is significant because the coronavirus had not yet reached pandemic status and there were no detected cases of community spread in the US. We don’t speak at all of the crisis in our interview and listening today it seems a bit tone-deaf. As you listen, I invite you to place the conversation in the context of the incredibly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous [VUCA] environment we’re living in.

Throughout the conversation, Bob talks about practices he personally engages in to deepen his own development. I’ve taken the liberty to document my version of those and I’ve provided a link to them in the episode notes and on my website at www.rise-leaders.com/podcast. 

We spend most of our time in this interview on the Creative and Reactive dimensions of the model and on the latest findings gathered from a database of write-in comments provided when leaders rate other leaders. Bob and Bill Adams’ latest book, Scaling Leadership, is based on this provocative data. 

Bob reviews the Top 10 Most-Endorsed Strengths for High Creative Leaders from this research (hint: people, people, people).

He shares his own examples of moving from a Reactive to Creative style of leadership and the deep reflection and stillness that is required to speak with authenticity and in a way that uses conflict generatively.

Links:

Transcript:

https://bit.ly/39ORe1F

Creative and Reactive dimensions of the model:

https://leadershipcircle.com/en/products/leadership-circle-profile/

Leadership Circle Profile:

https://leadershipcircle.com/en/home/

Scaling Leadership (book):

https://leadershipcircle.com/en/our-books/

Full Circle Group:

https://www.fcg-global.com/

Bob Kegan:

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/robert-kegan

Socialized and Self-Authoring mindsets:

https://libraryofconcepts.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/three-most-relevant-stages-of-human-development-nowadays-kegan-13/

Stephen Covey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Covey

Mastering Leadership:

https://leadershipcircle.com/en/our-books/

Download Practices to Boot Up Your Inner Game:

https://rise-leaders.com/practices-for-booting-up-your-inner-game/